CA's pool plans ignore needs of older residents [Letter]

It appears that CA is more interested in building facilities that bring in new revenue than in serving its core population and the needs that population has identified. CA hired Williams Aquatics to look for inexpensive ways to create much needed indoor lap lanes for Columbia's growing number of exercise lap swimmers and year-round competition swimmers. The Williams firm identified several doable and relatively inexpensive ways to build a new indoor pool or enclosing an existing pool. Instead of serious consideration of the alternatives Williams offered, CA's Rob Goldman now wants to heat an outdoor pool year-round, a cheap and unappealing alternative that would satisfy no one.

While the relatively inexpensive proposal for making the Locust Park pool indoors, and other ideas for serving the current population of swimmers, languish, a plan to spend $2.7 million on a swanky club at the lakefront has been fast-tracked to open next year. It will not be available to regular package plan members without a premium. Does CA realize that as Columbia grays and seniors find their accustomed form of exercise too hard on the body, the need for indoor pool lanes, without additional cost to consumers, will only increase? Is it so smitten with the additional funds it can generate by building a facility dedicated to every trendy alternative therapy that it has thrown its core constituents under the bus? Tell me it ain't so, CA.